Plot thickens in case of the beer bandit

Police never got a complaint, Tim Hortons employees never noticed a man complaining of theft, and Ronnie Talbot, or whoever is using that name, isn’t returning calls. (FILE)

Ronnie Talbot has gone to ground.

Doubts have surfaced about the identity of the Whitney Pier man whose expletive-laden posts about someone stealing a case of beer out of the back of his truck went viral last month.

“I’m not sure if others have contacted you about the Ronnie Talbot piece you covered, but I’m sorry to say it’s not true,” Donnie Calabrese said in an email Monday.

“The too (im)perfect impression of an incensed stereotypical Cape Breton man is from a fake account. I don’t know the guy who invented Ronnie Talbot but I do know it’s made up, and the well-meaning news outlets who’ve covered the FB post have been had. I would encourage you to look more into the person you spoke to for the interview — it’s definitely not the half-cooked Summertime Revue jape he’s claiming to be.”

In an interview Friday, Calabrese said people who speak like Talbot don’t try to include their accent in their writing.

“Some people do — James Joyce and Alistair MacLeod write accents when they’re trying to depict those characters,” he said. “But those characters aren’t trying to impersonate themselves.”

The information Talbot gave about the beer heist and Terry, the prime suspect, just don’t add up, said Calabrese, working on a PhD on Joyce at Western University and teaching at CBU.

“It’s too perfect,” he said. “It sounds like the screenplay from Margaret’s Museum.”

An employee at the Whitney Pier Tim Hortons — where Talbot alleged a flat of beer was stolen from his truck in the parking lot — said Friday no theft was reported to staff at the coffee shop. “We honestly don’t know if it’s true or not,” said the woman, who wouldn’t give her name.

“We do have kids that work here that say they worked that evening and nobody . . . came in and asked about any guy stealing his two-four.”

Cape Breton Regional Police also have no record of anyone complaining about the stolen beer. The man who identified as Talbot during a phone interview last week has not responded to multiple notes or calls.

Cory McNeil, one of the administrators of the Cape Breton Rant Room, where Talbot’s orginal post appeared, said Friday he believes Talbot is real because they share friends on Facebook. But he suspects the post about the stolen beer is not.

“Something like that could happen around here, but I don’t think there’s any truth to it,” said McNeil, a lineman with Nova Scotia Power.

A song by Cape Breton band Pretty Archie about the alleged beer burglary is getting lots of radio play on the island, he said. “It’s the big talk,” McNeil said of lore surrounding Ronnie Talbot and Terry, the culprit who allegedly took his beer. “You can’t go anywhere and someone’s not making a joke about Terry and Ronnie.”

A GoFundMe page set up by David Jones to replace the allegedly stolen beer had raised $400 by Friday. But Jones, too, did not respond to multiple interview requests over the course of the week.

Whoever is running Ronnie Talbot’s Facebook page has indicated that the money will go, instead, to the Whitney Pier Youth Club. But, so far, that organization hasn’t seen the cash.

“No one has officially reached out to us to say, yes, any moneys that are coming into this will be donated,” said Suzanne Gray, who heads fundraising efforts at the youth club. She has heard all the buzz around Talbot’s lament for lost beer. “It’s hilarious.”

Gray said the youth club recently spent $65,000 on a 24-passenger bus. The non-profit doesn’t want anyone to confuse in-house fundraising efforts with the one associated with missing beer.

“We appreciate the help anytime,” she said. “But . . . you can appreciate the position it puts us in if people are fundraising on our behalf without actually telling us.”